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The World as the Other: A Decolonial Take on Soviet-Armenian Cinema
18/05/2024 @ 18:00

Talk and Q&A with Vigen Galstyan
Saturday, May 18, 18:00
On Saturday, May 18, Depo will host a talk by art historian and curator Vigen Galstyan, who will discuss how the knotty legacy of Soviet-Armenian cinema could be decolonised.
Once the largest centralised film production system in the world, Soviet cinema served as a mechanism for a pan-national, socialist universalism which, in effect, meant the transformation of Russian culture into the colonial lingua-franca of the socialist world at large. Hence, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the issue of decolonising the non-Russian cinematic legacies has acquired a new urgency, especially in light of the current political events. But how does one decolonise a cinema born through this imperial initiative?
By insisting on the exclusively self-indigenising modality of ‘minor’ cinemas like that of Armenia, there is an inadvertent risk of falling back on the same colonial tropes of marginalisation, which target not the self-representational agency of local visual culture, but its ability to speak of and to the world at large. By addressing films on non-Armenian, or transnational subjects, this talk strives to reframe the rich legacy of Armenian cinema as a platform for global connectivities, allowing us to seek revealing and unexpected reflections of the world within the prism of the local and establish a firmer ground for overcoming the mechanisms of colonial disempowerment.
The talk will be in English and registration is not required to participate.
Vigen Galstyan is an art historian and curator based in Yerevan with a PhD in art history from the University of Sydney. Since 2005 Vigen has been realising various large-scale research and scholarly projects dedicated to the history of Armenian photography, cinema, design and modern art, among which is the Lusadaran Armenian Photography Foundation and ManBan Visual Culture Archive. Since 2006 he has authored numerous exhibitions, film programs, essays and catalogues on the history of photography and modern Armenian art. Between 2020 and 2023 Vigen served as the Head of Heritage Department at the National Cinema Centre of Armenia and is currently the director of ManBan Archive, as well as the founding curator of photography at the National Gallery of Armenia.
This talk is made possible within the framework of the Support to the Armenia-Turkey Normalisation Process (ATNP).
Image: Henrik Malyan, Biz ve Dağlarımız / We and Our Mountains (1969)